Free-market environmentalism

Free market environmentalism is an ideology that argues the free market is the best tool to preserve the health and sustainability of the environment. This is in sharp contrast to the most common modern approach of looking to government intervention to help prevent excessive destruction of the environment.

Objections

There are a number of arguments against free market environmentalism:

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• Not all aspects of the public domain are "privatisable" in practice. For example, it would be impossible to charge access to breathable air or to the climate, so stopping air pollution or global warming would be very difficult. For issues like this free market environmentalists often support carbon trading schemes advocated by other environmentalist movements. The US Clean Air Act of 1990, for instance, set up a system of emissions trading for sulfur dioxide. The Kyoto protocol also seeks to establish a system of emissions trading for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
• The conservation of endangered species not necessarily acheivable using the free market, especially where there is little economic value in the species in question. For example: there might be only limited profit to be made from a piece of land by maintaining it as the habitat of a rare beetle, whereas alternative economic uses for that land (which might be deleterious to the welfare of the beetle) - such as building a parking lot on it - might yield a greater profit. This objection (impliedly) assumes that the beetle has some innate value (even irrespective of its role in the ecosystem which, by definition, must be limited), an assumption which is not unproblematic, relying as it does on a conception of natural rights which has been comprehensively rebutted by thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham (who famously described the idea of inalienable natural rights as "nonsense on stilts").
• A related philosophical objection is that free market environmentalism is entirely anthropocentric and ignores the innate value of nature outside of human use of it. (see ecocentrism). The same counter-objection as to the nonsensicalness of natural rights also applies here.